Chapter VII: Part II: “On les aura” (3)

Madeleine had the queerest feeling of all her life up to that day, for she was not a girl to faint--a sinking feeling, not painful, rather comforting. Then nothing. Then a reawakening, not so comfortable, dismay, weakness. Georges, who did nothing by halves, became, for the nonce, generous to the utmost limit of the nature of a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a cheque-book in the pocket of his first suit. Probably it never crossed his mind that she had taken infection from some carelessness of his. But he did better. He promptly called a young doctor of his set, who, having been badly wounded, was now permanently attached to the Paris garrison. Between affection for Georges and a handsome bribe--for the proceeding was thoroughly irregular--flat contrary to every by-law of the town and every order of the Medical Service--this young man took Madeleine in hand, visited her daily, did what was necessary in the way of prescribing, got a discreet sister of charity to nurse her. Being a man of the world, he further suggested to her, as soon as she was well enough to make inquiries, that she would not care for Georges to see her in her present state. That kept her quiet during the weeks of recovery. But there came a fine June day when she was well enough to walk out a little in a Paris ever more feverish and deserted. Then the young doctor, as thorough as Georges or herself, told her the truth. Georges’ thoroughness had taken the form of borrowing the identity disc and paybook of a hospital casualty whom he resembled in height and complexion. The young doctor had connived at the fraud, with the cynicism of Georges himself and all his set. Thus furnished, Georges had gone straight into the heart of that ghastly failure of the French in Champagne, during May, 1917. The hurried scrutiny of his credentials had not found him out, he was in the line and fighting when his half-recovered health broke down once more, and fatally. He was buried in a huge, ever-growing cemetery, near the Aerodrome, at Avenant-le-Petit.

* * * * *

When Madeleine realized it, she sat still, looking at nothing, gathering within her all her physical vitality to meet this blow to the spirit. On her face, refined by illness, was something of the look that horses have under heavy shell-fire, bewildered resistance to the unknown. The young doctor let her alone for twenty-four hours, and then very gently led her mind back to practical considerations. The period for which Georges had hired the flat was expiring shortly. Had she money, or the means of getting some? It did not take her long to run over the alternatives--an attempt to get back into some sort of office--or a begging letter to Skene? She avoided both, not from any sense of shame, but simply because now Paris and its life had no meaning for her. She had wanted Georges. She had said, “If I could only see him!” She had seen him. Now she would never see him again. Why bother?

The young doctor then suggested that he could obtain her a permission to travel by train to Hazebrouck. This brought to her mind the almost certain death of her brother, Marcel, in his German prison camp, and of Marie’s return to Laventie. The mere name of the market town called up at once associations so potent, so much more real than all that had happened since. The farm understaffed, the old father being swindled out of billeting money! Those were realities. Those things appealed to her more than this tragic dream-life. She accepted gladly the young doctor’s offer, and left him looking after her and muttering: “What a type, all the same!” But she had no special contempt or dislike for him.

She left Paris in the same way as she left him. The old sacred towers, the new garish restaurants, the keen bitter energy, the feminine grace, of that metropolis of the world, that had once again had the enemy at its gates, and was yet to be bombarded by such engines as had never before been turned upon city of man--she turned her back upon it all, and, for her, it was not. On a gray July day she entered the train. As she traveled homewards, the day grew grayer and wetter. She passed, unheeding, through an immense bustle between Abbeville and Calais, and down to St. Omer. Her train stopped frequently, and she glanced, uninterested, at the trains and trucks, materials and men, that choked rail and road. About her, people talked of the great offensive the English had begun, from Ypres to the sea. She looked at the crops and houses, thought of her father, whose very double, tall, old, dark-clothed, and bent, she saw in almost every teeming field of flax or hops, grain or roots, of that rich valley. Perhaps she had occasional bitter spasms of anger against this war, that had enslaved, and then destroyed Georges. But to her, facts were facts, and she did not deny them.

* * * * *

Outside Hazebrouck the train stopped interminably. The guns had been audible, loud and angry for some time, but the long roll of them was punctuated now by a sharper nearer sound, that clubbed one about the ears at regular intervals--artillery practising, no doubt, she thought. After waiting in the motionless train as long as she considered reasonable, she got out, finding a perverse satisfaction in the use of her limbs, swinging down the steep side of the second-class carriage of the Nord Railway, and asking for her box and “cardboard” (containing hats) to be handed down to her. Shouldering these, she marched along the asphalt with which the prodigal English had re-enforced the embankment, showing no concern at the cries of “They bombard!” shouted to her by her fellow-passengers. She passed the engine, from which the driver and fireman were peering ahead. The fields were very deserted, but she was hardly the sort to be frightened in daylight, or dark either. She passed the points where the Dunkirk line joined that from St. Omer. Near by, stood a row of cottages, known as the “Seven Chimneys,” the first houses of Hazebrouck, on the station side. Her idea was to leave her trunk at the estaminet, for her father to fetch in the morning. To her astonishment, the whole row appeared deserted, empty, doors open, fires burning, food cooking. Somewhat nonplussed, she stopped a moment to get her breath, pushed her box behind the counter of the estaminet, where she was known, and then passed on, with her “cardboard,” keeping the path that separates the St. Omer road from the railway. Where this reached its highest point, just at the entry to the town, she happened to glance across the rich, lonely, hedgeless fields towards the Aire road, and saw, on that side, every wall and alley black with people. She had no time to reflect on this peculiarity before she was deafened by such a roaring upheaval of earth as she had certainly never imagined. It took away her breath, wrenched her “cardboard” out of her hands. For some seconds she could hear nothing, see nothing, but when her senses returned, the first thing she noticed was the patter of falling débris. The shell had fallen in the ditch of the railway embankment, and made a hole the size of the midden at home, and three times as deep. She picked herself up from her knees, dusted herself, recaptured her “cardboard,” and passed on, greeted by a long “Ah--a--ah!” from scores of throats of the spectators, a quarter of a mile away. The incident annoyed her. They were bombarding, and no mistake. But it would take worse than that to prevent her from crossing the railway under the arch, and taking the Calais road. The rue de St. Omer was empty, but undamaged. They were a jumpy lot, she thought; it revolted her to see all those good houses, left unlocked and open to all the ills that attack abandoned property. There was not even another shell-hole nearer than the station, so far as she could see. She would have liked a cup of coffee and a slice of bread, but the town was empty as an eggshell. She heard another explosion behind her as she reached the Calais pavé. The persistence of those Bosches! But she was persistent too, and gathered her damp clothes and battered “cardboard” to her, as she strode vigorously home. She was not sentimental--no one less so, but it may well have been that her blood quickened, and her rooted strength returned, as she found herself, once more, facing that salt wind, under those low gray skies, among which she had been bred and born.

At length she came to the earth road, the signpost, and the turning, and saw the farm, the fringe of dead wallflower stalks on the ridge of the thatch, the old “shot” tower by the bridge over the moat. It was between six and seven when she passed the brick-pillared gate, noted a new bomb-hole, and signs of military occupation. Entering by the door, she found her father in the passage.

“It’s our Madeleine,” he said quietly.

Madeleine kissed him and told him to fetch her box in the morning, from “Seven Chimneys.”

He said, “Thy room is empty,” and went into the kitchen, while she said a word to Berthe. It was true, her little room was just as she had left it a year before. She noted the fact with quiet satisfaction, but did not bother over the significance of it--over the fact that her father, who usually paid so little heed to anything that went on in the house, had kept her room untouched and empty for her. She quietly accepted the fact, conscious that he felt that neither the God to whom he muttered prayers on Sunday, nor the various temporal powers whom he obeyed, when he had to, on weekdays, really understood him or cared for him as his younger daughter did. She sat down with him, in the dim kitchen, to the evening meal, by the light of the day that was dying in thin drizzle and incessant mutter of guns. Once some fearful counter-barrage made the old panes of the oriel window rattle, and the old man said:

“It’s a swine of a war, all the same!”

Madeleine replied: “It’s something new for them to be bombarded in Hazebrouck!”

“I’m going to take the money out of the Savings Bank,” he commented. In his mind, unused to the facilities of bookkeeping, and cradled in the cult of the worsted stocking for savings, he probably thought of his money as being held in notes or coin in the stoutly-barred vault behind the Mairie. After a long pause, during which he surveyed her hands, busy with household mending, somewhat neglected since Marie had relinquished it to Berthe, he spoke again:

“You are quite a fine lady of the town!”

“That will soon pass,” she answered, without ceasing to ply her needle.

Later he said: “You know Marie has returned to Laventie?”

Madeleine nodded. The remark was not so stupid as it sounded. He knew she knew the fact. It was his way of appealing to her.

“Now you have come back, you will be just the Madeleine you used to be, and all will go on as before, won’t it?”

Her nod was all the answer he asked.

Once again he spoke: “You know Marcel is dead?”

Again she nodded. Again it was only his way of saying, “Come what may, you will see me through, we shall not be worse off for the cruelties of Fate!” She understood and acquiesced. Nothing else passed until with “Good night, father,” and “Good night, my girl,” they parted.

Of her life during the past twelve months and all it had contained, not a word.

_PART III_

LA GALETTE

_PART III_

_La Galette_

The late summer of 1917, the summer of Haig’s offensive from Ypres, was one of the wettest of the war, but the days following Madeleine’s return opened fine.

She was up betimes, and soon made herself apparent in the life of the farm. Harvest must begin the moment things were dry enough, and before they became too dry, so that the cut grain would neither sprout as it lay, nor spill itself as it fell. Besides herself and her father, they had Berthe, and the family of Belgian refugees, two boys too young for service, and eight women of all ages. A thoughtful government had added two Territorial soldiers of the very oldest class, who could easily be spared from such military duty as they were fit for; and to this, a still more thoughtful Madeleine mentally added some amount of help that could be extracted, by one means or another, from English troops resting in the area. At the moment of her return there were no troops, but artillery came on the following day. There also came a platelayer’s family from Hazebrouck, whose house was too near the big shells that had fallen. Madeleine drove a hard bargain with them, work in the fields as the price of a loft in the outhouses, until the latter should be required for potatoes. But these matters were not her first concern. She made a long and careful scrutiny of the billeting money that had been paid during her absence. Marie was too accustomed to the rough methods of those who live on the edge of the trenches, and knew little of the fine art of making the English pay.

Madeleine went to see Monsieur Blanquart in the morning recess of the school, and found him perceptibly grayer and more harassed, almost snowed under by the immense weight of paper, by which a government, in sore straits, discharged its expedients upon its humbler representatives. In addition to the correspondence and registration necessitated by general mobilization, and by the occupation of an allied army, there were now circulars and returns concerning food production, waste prevention, aircraft precautions, counterespionage, and the surveillance of prices. In such circumstances, Blanquart probably wished her back in Paris, but she insisted. After bitter argument, he suddenly surveyed her with a gleam of interest.

“There, you aren’t greatly changed; but what induced you to leave a good job in the Ministry?”

Madeleine realized that she was an object of admiring interest, with who-knows-what history invented for her by Cécile. She pushed it all aside. “I had better things to do than to go moldy in an office. Now, Monsieur Blanquart, for the month of March, there is only seventy-five francs marked down. How do you explain it?” and so on.

* * * * *

She came back from the village across the fields, scrutinizing the crops, the workers, the new drains and telegraph wires the English were putting in everywhere. Already, in a few hours, her short assumption of town life and habit was dropping from her. She had put it away with the town hats Skene and Georges had bought for her, in the “cardboard,” on the half-tester of her bed. She went bareheaded, already stepping longer and holding her skirt, with both hands, up from the wetness of the knee-high root crops, and away from the waist-high grains. Her illness had squared and filled out her figure, deprived it of its virginal severity, and now the refinement that indoor life, suffering, and impaired health had given to her features and skin, was yielding before fresh air, good food, vigorous action, and the habit of command. Only her straight glance, and erect carriage, that she had taken to town remained as the town was forgotten. The town could not take those from her, the country could only confirm them. Two officers’ servants, who had let the chargers they were leading graze surreptitiously on the rich second cut of the water-meadows by the little stream that issued from the moat, hastily pulled up the horses’ heads, and resumed the road. She had made herself known to the new unit that morning, already.

In the dark passage she ran into a dragoon-like figure, that even her accustomed eyes mistook for the moment for that of a soldier. Then she saw who it was, swallowed a lump in the throat, and said:

“Hold, it is you, Placide, enter then, and be seated!”

“Ah, it is you, Madeleine, returned. How do you go on?”

“But well! and you? You can surely take a cup of coffee!”

“I shall not say no! One wants something to give courage in these times that are passing!”

Madeleine was busy over the coffee-pot, and only said: “Monsieur the Baron and Madame the Baronne have had a sad loss!”

Placide sighed like an eight-day clock running down, and then began. It took ten minutes for her to give her description of the reception of the news of Georges’ death at the château--of Monsieur’s fit of crying and swearing--of Madame’s fainting and prayers. Madeleine stood before her, hands on hips, planted, resisting the sudden, unexpected agony of reviving grief. When Placide remembered what she had come for (eggs and anthracite) and had gone, accompanied by a Belgian with a barrow, Madeleine poured her untasted coffee carefully back into the pot, and slipped out by the back door and away over the fields.

In a few minutes she was mounting the steep sodden path to the Kruysabel. The sun was coming out, and all around the earth steamed. The hunting shelter, intact and not noticeably weathered, had yet an air of neglect. Grass grew where grass should not, the windows were dim with cobweb and fly-smut. The door stuck, and inside the air was warm and moldy. The photos stared at her, the guardian spirit of the place, as she moved from room to room, tried handles, dusted, rubbed, and shook things. The seats invited her, the mirrors showed her active restlessness. At last she stood still, and some spasm of acute realization seemed to gather and descend on her, and she wrung her hands. “What will become of it all?” she cried aloud. It, undefined, being the old happy easy life of pre-war. A great sob broke from her, and at its sound in that lonely place of memories, she pulled herself together, put away her things, and looked up. As she trod the reeking moss and gluey mud on the way home, she seemed to be treading something down into the earth, as, alas, many another was to do, like her, throwing in vain a little mold of forgetfulness on the face of recollection that, buried, yet refused to die.

* * * * *

Day succeeded day, mostly wet, almost always noisy. The interminable offensive dragged to its sodden end. Unit succeeded unit, and then French succeeded English, and even the heroes of Verdun, Champagne, the Argonne had no good word to say of their new sector. Gas they knew, and shells and machine-gun fire, but to be Drowned was the last refinement of a war that had already surpassed all notions of possible evil, all tales of Sedan, all histories of old-time carnage.

All this made little or no impression upon Madeleine. The old life had slipped back upon her like a glove. German bombs dropped in or about the pasture, spoiled her sleep, made her apprehensive of fire and damage. Otherwise she merely learned from the talk around the kitchen stove that the war was just what she had always felt it to be--a crowning imbecility of insupportable grown-up children. All that one wanted was to be left tranquil. There was always plenty to do, and, if one were only left alone, money to be made. Economics, politics, sociology were beyond her, and had they not been so, they would have weighed with her no more than they ever have done with agricultural, self-contained, homekeeping three-quarters of France. That Germany was anxious for her young industries, England for her old ones, France for her language and racial existence, that governments grow naturally corrupt as milk gets sour, by mere effluxion of time, that captains of industry must be ruthless or perish, all this did not sway her mind. All one wanted was to be left tranquil. Tranquillity being denied, she did the best she could.

The officers who hired the front rooms, the men and animals billeted in the farm buildings, the N.C.O.’s, orderlies, what-not, might be dispirited, jumpy, no longer the easy-going confident English of other years, but they still bought what she had to sell, and paid for what they had--more rather than less, as the conscripted civilian, craving the comforts from which he had been torn, replaced the regular soldier or early volunteer, who had never known or had disdained them. She got a good deal of help with the harvest. The English had all sorts of stores, appliances, above all, plenty of willing arms, that she wanted. The troops “in rest” were glad enough for the most part, when off duty, to do any small job to take their minds off the world-wide calamity that enveloped them, or that gave the momentary illusion of peace-time ease and freedom. Owing to the submarine campaign they were rather encouraged than otherwise. The harvest, though not magnificent, was fair, and the ever-rising scale of officially fixed prices left always a larger margin of profit. Thus “One does what one can!” was Madeleine’s appropriate comment, when asked. Very little escaped her, as that murderous sodden autumn closed in.

* * * * *

It was about Christmas time that the bombardment of all the back areas, especially Hazebrouck, recommenced in earnest. It was the period at which the Germans regained the initiative. Madeleine noticed a fact like that. She noticed also the extraordinary thinning out of the troops. They either went forward into the line or far back, into rest, beyond St. Omer. But the headlines of the papers, the rumors her father brought home from the estaminet, moved her not one whit. The Russian revolution, the advent of America, the British and French man-power questions, Roumanian or Syrian affairs, all left her cold. She read of them in French and English impartially, with all the distrust of her sort for the printed word. It was not until she heard the Baron descant upon the situation, during a visit he paid her father, that she began to take any serious account of the way the war was trending. The Baron had been severely shaken by the death of his son. A view of life, which seldom went beyond personal comfort, had been vitally disconcerted by the final dispersal of one of its cherished comforts, the idea of a son to succeed to and prolong the enjoyment of life. He had the gloomiest forebodings, blamed Russians, Roumanians, English, Americans, Portuguese, Turks, Germans, in turn for the dark days certainly ahead. Madeleine listened with the tolerant submission proper from a chief tenant’s daughter toward the master. When the Baron spoke of “my son,” her just appreciation was never misled into thinking that he meant her lover. The two were distinct. She had her own bitter memories, black moods, tears even. That was her affair. The Baron’s loss of his son was his, a different matter. She sympathized demurely. As for the news he brought, the probable German offensive in the spring, she made a rapid calculation, and dismissed the matter. Not good at imagining, she could not conceive of anything the Germans might do that she would not outwit. The crops and animals, she reckoned, could be stored in safety, the money and valuables she could trust herself to take care of; the solid old house and furniture she could not picture as suffering much damage. Of any personal fear for herself she felt no qualm. Except for a few moments during her illness in Paris, she had known no physical terror since, an infant, she had ceased to be afraid of the dark, finding by experience that it did not touch her. She poured out the Baron’s drink at her father’s request, and let him talk.

Poor Baron, though Madeleine did not realize it, what else could he do? Born so that he was four years too young to take part in the war of 1870, he was now eight years too old to take part in that of 1914. He could only fight with his tongue, and that he did. But he was fundamentally unchanged, rallied Madeleine on the havoc her good looks must have wrought in Amiens and Paris. Madeleine smiled dutifully. To her he represented one of the guarantees of order and stability. Without an elaborate argument, she concluded that so long as there was a baron above her, and her father, there would be, at the other end of the social scale, laborers, refugees, all sorts of humble folk just as far beneath the level at which she and hers swam. It seemed just that those above and those below should be equally exploitable by the adroit farmer’s daughter, anchored securely midway.

* * * * *

Spring came, the spring of 1918: surely the most tragically beautiful of all the springs the old world has seen! The frosts and darkness passed. Flowers came out in the Kruysabel. It was a busy time of mucking, plowing, rolling, sowing. Nothing happened. Hazebrouck, too much bombarded, ceased to hold its market. Madeleine went to Cassel instead. The news of the great German break-through on the Somme did not even impress her, she was busy preparing to get the main-crop potatoes in, before Easter. Let them fight on the Somme, so she might sow Flanders.

But three weeks later there did occur at length something to impress her. On the unforgettable 11th of April, 1918, the guns were very loud. On the 12th there were hurried movements of troops. All sorts of odd rumors came floating back from all points between Ypres and La Bassée. The Germans had broken through! The Germans had not broken through, but had been thrown back! Estaires was on fire! Locre was taken, and so on. Madeleine had occasion to go to the Mairie, to argue as to why her old Territorials should have been recalled from the farm, and found Monsieur Blanquart packing all his records into a great wooden case. He stopped and stared at her:

“What are you doing, Monsieur Blanquart?”

He raised his hands with unaccustomed nervousness.

“It is a formal order from the Government!”

He would not listen to her tale of billeting money unpaid, and government fertilizer not delivered: “There are other things to do at this moment,” was all he would say. For once Madeleine did not get her way. That impressed her. The next day the horizon to the south and east was black with pillars of smoke. By night these became pillars of flame, biblical, ominous. The incessant sounds of battle changed in timbre. The heavy bombardment ceased. Nearer and nearer crept the rattle of machine guns. Madeleine had one or two errands, and returning by the village shortly afterwards, was astonished to find all the shops shut. Vanhove, the butcher, was loading his best brass bedstead and mattress on to--what of all conceivable vehicles? Madeleine stared before she took it in. It was the roller, the road roller. None other. The well-known road roller the English had installed. Built by Aveling & Porter at Rochester in the ’eighties, it had ground and panted its unwieldy frame northward through many a township and village of England, passing from hand to ever poorer hand, as it deteriorated, until finally the obscure and almost penniless Rural District Council of Marsham and Little Uttersfield, failing to sell it, had painted their name on its boiler and kept it. Unloaded, like so many other derelicts, into the arms of the British Expeditionary Force in the glad enthusiasm of 1915, it had served the turn of an intelligent English Engineer, who, early in the war, had discovered that roads and railways, food and patience alone could win in such a struggle. He had soon been shipped off to the East, lest he bring shame upon his betters, but his roller had remained for years now, on that section of the Joint Road Control of the Second English Army, with the French Ponts et Chaussées Authority, who divided acrimoniously between them the control of the Hazebrouck sub-area. The machine had become a portent in Hondebecq. The children had swung behind it, horses ceased to shy at it, and Madeleine herself had come, in time, to have something almost like affection for it, as a monument of the queer, wayward genius of the English. No such rollers ever rolled the roads of France, but Madeleine had found it useful for both rolling and traction. She had made friends with the two middle-aged, sooty-khakied Derbyshire men who lived with it and got them to do jobs for her. Now she laid a hand gingerly on the warm shining rail of the “cab” and asked of the driver.

“What are you doing!”

“Got to go, Mamzelle, partee, you know!”

“You like a ride, miss? Get up and we’ll take you as far as St. Omer!” his mate added. “Alleman’s coming, you know!”

Something fierce prompted Madeleine to say: “I’m not going to run away!” But Vanhove, having hoisted his bedstead into the tender, was persuading the men to drive on.

Madeleine saw the lever put over, and the ponderous machine of another generation roar away upon the cobbles, its single cylinder panting desperately. Then she felt indeed disturbed, as though she had been forced to part with a conviction.

* * * * *

As she went back to the farm through the fairy beauty of the evening--(were ever evenings so beautiful as those of the April retreat?)--her step was no less firm, her glance as calm, as usual. Passing over the plank bridge, and entering the house by the back, she was confronted by the spectacle of Berthe in her best hat, with a bundle.

“I’m going!” said the apparition simply.

“What has come over you?”

“After you were gone, an English wagon came, all full of people from Armentières way. The secretary of Nieppe told the patron that the Bosche are in Laventie, and that Marie has left, so the Patron has taken the tumbril and gone after her potatoes!”

Madeleine was at no loss. She even approved the old man’s determination. Only she considered that it would have been better for her to go.

“You stay here,” she said. “I’m going up to the château to borrow the young Baron’s bicycle!” She knew well enough that Georges’ machine was stowed away in the coachhouse. On that she could catch her father, and send him back. But she had not reckoned up the situation.

“No,” said Berthe, “I’m going!”

“Why, you’re not frightened like that silly lot from Armentières?”

But the terror-stricken faces and bandaged heads of those civilians in the lorry, who had so narrowly escaped the battle, had broken Berthe’s nerve--which was never the equal of Madeleine’s. She shouldered her bundle.

“I’m going!” she said simply.

Madeleine was not accustomed to being disobeyed, and there is no knowing what she might not have done had she not been in a hurry herself.

“Very well, go then! Tell the Picquart family to lock up the sheds. I’m going after the patron!”

“The Picquarts are gone, this half-hour, with their things in the wheelbarrow!”

Just then the breeze that stirs at dusk blew open the door, and there entered into the darkening passage with startling nearness the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of German machine guns. Madeleine flung away: “Go and burst yourselves as quick as possible, heap of dirtiness!” she cried, and set off at a run for the château.

The village seemed even more ominous than before, now it was half dark, and not a light in the abandoned houses. Some English transport was crossing the square, however, with the patient sour look of men going “into it” again--“it,” the battle. She turned into the steep silent alley that led through the iron grille, to the “drive” of the château, and broke into a run again on the smooth gravel. She had not gone twenty yards before she jumped as if shot. A black figure had risen behind the trunk of a tree with a sharp “Hish!” She fell sideways, clutching an elm sapling that bent with her, staring. The figure made two steps towards her, and she, petrified, could only maintain her balance and stare. Then with infinite relief she heard: “Tiens, it’s you, Madeleine! What do you want?”

“Why, Monsieur le Baron, I didn’t know you!”

“Be quiet then. There is some one wandering round the château. It may be the Bosche!”

“What, are they here?”

“The village has been formally evacuated. One expects them from one moment to another!”

At that instant steps and voices could be heard on the terrace surrounding the house, which, on account of the winding of the drive by way of the old moat, was just above the level of their eyes. The Baron, quivering all over, not with fear, but with sporting instinct, brought his spiked camp stool to the charge, and tiptoed noiselessly up the bank. Madeleine, clutching her skirt with one hand, swinging herself up by the undergrowth with the other, arrived beside him just in time to see two familiar Australian figures looming leisurely in the darkness. In another instant the Baron would have sprung, with no one knows what results. Madeleine pushed past him, stepped over the flower-bed that bordered the terrace, and walked up to the visitors, addressing them in their own inimitable language, learned from their own lips in the kitchen of the Spanish Farm:

“Hello, Digger, what you want?”

The tall lean men turned without surprise:

“To get in,” replied the nearer.

Madeleine hastily translated. The Baron, after staring a moment, led the way to the back.

The château possessed, of course, no bell or knocker, as Leon, the concierge, or his wife, were always to be found near the gate, to steer frontdoor visitors round to their appropriate entrance, and open for them. Lesser mortals came to the kitchen door, where Placide dealt with them as St. Peter is reported to deal with ambitious souls in another place. Since the war, and more especially since the concierge and all his family had been evacuated, the whole of the windows and doors were closed, bolted and shuttered.

The first object that met the gaze of the little party, as they rounded the corner of the building, was Leon’s garden ladder, reared against the window of the Baron’s dressing-room, in the eastern wing, from which protruded the hindquarters and legs of a man, in stout service riding breeches and dirty boots.

“Thunder of God,” cried the Baron, seizing the ladder and shaking it violently, “come down, or I’ll bring you!”

An Australian added quietly, “You’d best come down, Mercadet, and tell Jim!”

A few hurried calls in Franco-English and laconic Australian replies, and a French interpreter climbed, an Australian soldier slid, down the ladder.

“Well, sir,” demanded the Baron of the former, “you have large views of your duties!”

“Sir,” replied the interpreter, “the place is officially evacuated. We have a right here. You have not!”

“I have said I will not budge,” replied the Baron, folding his arms, “and budge I will not!”

“Monsieur le Baron,” interposed Madeleine, “all these will be very useful if the Bosche come!”

The Baron strode to the heavy kitchen door and struck a succession of blows with his stick, shouting at the top of his voice, “Placide, open then, you are as lazy as stupid!”

Very shortly a light glimmered and the bolts shot back. The door turned, and Placide barred the way, as an old-fashioned clothes-horse covers a blazing fire. It took her a moment or two to understand.

“Ah, it is you, Monsieur le Baron!”

“Did you think it was the devil?”

“I was upstairs seeing to the calorifère of Madame, who is in the chapel. I thought you were gone to the village!”

Her master pushed past. “Here are officers come to billet. Are the rooms ready?”

He had, of course, assumed that none but officers would dream of coming to the château of Hondebecq.

Madeleine, by the light of Placide’s candle, soon knew better. The Australian who had spoken was a Colonel, the other two and the French interpreter were privates. As they trooped into the passage, the Colonel called over his shoulder, “Come on, boys!”

From the kitchen garden, where they had sat silent and unnoticed spectators of the scene, there emerged a Lewis-gun section and orderlies. Beyond them transport was dimly visible: mules silent as their drivers, standing as if cut in stone.

“Madeleine,” called the Baron, “explain to these gentlemen that all my servants have run off, but that Placide will serve supper as soon as may be!”

The Colonel, however, was busy with his machine gunners. The “cubby hutch,” as he called Leon’s potting shed, half-way up the drive would do for one position well, but he wished to command the garden and meadow beyond, and the fields skirting the village on that side. Madeleine understood perfectly. “There is the cellar skylight, level with the ground.”

The Colonel went to look. “It fits like the tail of Barnes’ donkey!” was his only comment.

Before he would sit down to his meal he asked: “Do I get the old man right, that his wife is here still?”

“She is praying for her son in the chapel!”

“Is he wounded?”

“He is dead.”

“He’ll be just as happy if she keeps alive. I’ve got a limber going back St. Omer way. She’d better go in that! Tell ’em!”

Madeleine explained the offer to the Baron, who thanked the Colonel profusely, saying that it was worthy of one gentleman to another.

The Colonel not understanding, when his mouth was empty, bowed as one unaccustomed and inquired: “It is his wife, isn’t it, all correct?”

Madeleine confirmed that the Baroness was “all correct.”

But the Baroness was an obstacle. First Placide, then the Baron himself went up to see her. She would only moan: “No, let them kill me, I shall see him again all the sooner. Besides, it is too late, and I am at least warm with the calorifère!”

Then Madeleine went up. There was nothing dramatic in the meeting between those two, the mother and the mistress of a dead man. Madeleine said steadily: “Madame, Monsieur Georges would prefer you to go!”

“You think so?”

“I am sure, madame!”

“In that case, I will!”

Madeleine helped her. But no one, unless it was the French interpreter, realized the pathos of the moment. The limber had been furnished with cushions, a small trunk, and a wooden box of Placide’s. The driver had announced that he was “going by the dirt roads, it’s easier for wimmen.” Then that faded lady kissed the man whom she had married because the Second Empire told her to, and replied to his “Courage, Eugènie,” simply: “I think I shall not catch cold!” and went away in an army limber, with Placide stalking behind.

* * * * *

Madeleine watched them go. Alone of all those present she, perhaps, noticed the change which seemed to settle down on the house, almost at once. It was not yet abandoned, but its women, its natural guardians, had gone from it.

The orderly, ration “fag” in mouth, cleared the table with a clatter, spilling grease on the floor. The marble overmantel, between the vases a former D’Archeville had brought from the sack of Pekin, and the Sèvres clock, became, as though by magic, littered with pipes, ashes, revolver ammunition, maps, indelible pencils--all the flotsam of men campaigning far from the decencies of property and housewifery. She tried to get the Baron on one side, having not for a moment forgotten her business at the château, but he was busy giving the Colonel, and a young officer who had come quietly in, as if by chance, some detail of the district. Before she could make her wants known, the Colonel, who had swept back the cloth, silver salts, plates, flower vases, all at one sweep, planted his 1 in 40,000 army map, and had his finger on the square pasture, and centerless E of building labeled “Ferme l’éspagnole”--the Spanish Farm.

“That belongs to mademoiselle,” the interpreter interposed, prompted by the Baron, indicating her.

“Arthur,” said the Colonel to the young officer, “your platoon can make a ‘strong point’ there, where the roads join, and sleep in the house, while it’s worth it!”

In an instant, Madeleine relinquished all thoughts of pursuing her father on the Baron’s bicycle. It was not merely that if she had had to choose between loyalty to her father and loyalty to the home, she would have chosen the latter. It was also that, had her father been there to counsel her, he would certainly have said, “Garde la maison, ma fille!” “Stick to the house, my girl.”

“I’ll go with you,” she told the lieutenant, and went out into the darkness with him.

The horizon, from beyond Ypres, to the northeast, right round to near Béthune to the south, was ablaze. Over captured Merville, Estaires, Armentières, hung floating lights. The bombardment had ceased, the Bosche being too fearful of hitting their own advanced parties. The machine gun clamor was subsiding, both sides no longer knowing in the darkness where their bullets went. The farm Madeleine found already occupied. Tall lean figures, magnified in the candle-light, had stripped lengths of fabric from an aeroplane that had come down in the pasture, and lay half buried, grotesquely mangled, a putrefying mass of charred human flesh, wood and delicate machinery in the middle. They were covering every crevice in the kitchen windows. They made shelters, and gun-pits, and loopholes. By midnight the house was no longer a farm, it was a tactical “strong point.” Madeleine had too much sense to protest, and declined firmly to be evacuated. Calling the officer and sergeant together, she pointed to her door:

“This my room. I lock the door. See, diggers?”

“All serene, missy, sleep well,” was the reply.

Madeleine did so. Like all those strong enough to stand it, she felt a kind of exaltation rising above any fear. Many a man felt like her that night. The long-distance bombardment, under which a human being was matched against a lump of steel as large and many times harder than himself, was over. To it succeeded the direct struggle of man against man, with machine gun, rifle and grenade. The Bosche were no longer awe-inspiring once they got beyond the range of their big guns. Let them come, the sooner the better. The great offensive had been threatened for months. It was here. Some would survive it. Meantime the chances were even. Madeleine slept.

* * * * *

No one knows, to this day, why the Bosche never got to Hondebecq, but they halted a mile short of it. Nothing happened. Anticlimax ruled. War moods of exaltation, begotten of danger, and the vitality that rises to meet it, cannot last. The battle of Bailleul dwindled out in gray, cold spring weather. The trench line stiffened and became as fixed as the old line from the Ypres salient to La Bassée had been, before Messines and Paschendaele. The Bosche tried again and again farther south with no more effect. In the north the reorganized English line held good. The mood which came with this new state of things began to show itself, in civilians and soldiers alike, to be one of steady exasperation. For what did all this endless effort amount to? One lived in a state not comparable to that of Peace, as regards comfort, business, or personal liberty. One side or the other made an offensive. The discomfort increased, the hectic war-time business was dislocated, personal liberty disappeared. But one thing remained--War. Enormously expensive, omnipresent, exasperating. Civilians and soldiers, the latter nearly all unwilling civilians now, felt its exasperation. Madeleine felt it. The Baron felt it. The troops billeted in the château and the farm felt it. The Baron, relieved from his wife’s querulous exactions, Madeleine, set free from dutiful if doubtful belief in her father’s methods of business, found the first Australian troops, if not charming visitors, at least good companions for the work in hand.

When it became certain that the enemy could get no farther, they were relieved, first by French troops, then by a Clydeside labor battalion. The Baron found his salle-à-manger filled with officers, who, though not actively ill-behaved, and probably well-meaning, he could see, whether he spoke their language or not, came of no particular family.

Madeleine found herself confronted with a set of cooks and quartermasters as businesslike as herself, far more akin to her in methods and outlook than had ever been the original volunteer army of England--who had paid what she asked with shy good humor. The neat walks and formal “bosquets” of the château garden, box-hedged, and decorated with plaster figures of nymphs and cupids, situate amid greenish pools, became pitted with latrines, and scarred with dugouts.

The village was beyond bullet range, but a 5.9 shell crashed in the top of the “shot” tower in the yard of the Spanish Farm. But worse than these evils were the continual thefts from the cellar of the château of wine, coal, and mattresses (for half the village had readily obtained leave to store their possessions there). At the farm, Madeleine was amazed to find herself forced to sell beer and butter, at less than cost price, by well-organized “strikes” that threatened to leave her merchandise on her hands.

The Baron, moreover, like so many of his age and nation at that time, had his private sorrow. Sharing his meals with the ever-changing messes of officers that filled his salle-à-manger (for the village being evacuated, there were no shops, and he was glad enough to trade away the accommodation he could to provide for food), he would stare round the youthful, unwarlike faces about him, faces of professional or business men, farmers or engineers from all corners of Great Britain or the Colonies, and would mutter, “I have no longer my son!”

Madeleine, more self-controlled, wore black. No funeral service had been said for Jerome Vanderlynden. He had “disappeared” in the trite phrase of the Casualty Lists. The old church in the “place” of Hondebecq had three gaping shell-holes in the roof. The doors were closed, and it was declared in brief official notice “Unsafe.” She did not even know if her numerous cousins and relations by marriage, scattered by the evacuation all across France from Evreux to Bordeaux, had heard what had happened to him. Nor did the thought of them greatly trouble her, accustomed to think and act for herself. She was doing what she knew so well her father was expecting of her. She was looking after the farm. The crops were sown. Such beasts as remained were tended. Jerome Vanderlynden had disappeared! That could not be helped, any more than the thefts of all the fowls from the yard. Madeleine just went on.

* * * * *

The days went by, and the two civilians left in Hondebecq hardly noticed a change that came over things in the last week of July, 1918. That war, continuing year in and year out, could not be measured according to its “victories” of one side or the other, by people so intensely intimate with it, because they lived on the edge of the trenches. The most perhaps that they noticed was the gradual cessation of the shelling. It was no longer necessary to run to dugouts from one’s bed at dawn, or from one’s evening meal. Yet, at last, something really had happened. Madeleine was dimly conscious of a new atmosphere in the shuttered and sand-bagged salle-à-manger, when she went up on one of her usual errands to the château. The old interpreter, Mercadet, attached to the area, was sticking flags in the map of the Western Front, with his melancholy precision. “One has still some force left!” he announced, and Madeleine saw without heeding that he was _moving the flags forward, instead of back_. It was, of course, Mangin’s flank attack of July, the turning-point of the war. She paid more attention, however, a week or two later, when the troops in the farm began to move. The Bosche were gone from Kemmel Hill, was all they said. She lost touch with the war at this point, having no one to give her news.

She contrived to secure a couple of mules she found wandering about, and being handy with animals, shut them up and fed them sparingly. Probably nothing in the whole war frightened her so much as those weeks of the month of September, when she was quite alone. Even the dog had been killed by the shell on the “shot” tower. Then, as the troops abandoned the château she found there a couple of aged veterans, left as billet wardens, and induced them, by pointing out truthfully how much better they would fare with her than in the Baron’s company in the lonely château, to move to the farm. These two old casual laborers, who had enlisted in 1914 when drunk or workless, and had ever since been living better than before the war, made no difficulties. But it was no object to her to make hardships for the Baron, once she had gained her point, and secured potential guardians and laborers for the farm. She invited him to take his meals with her, and neither laughed nor chided as he stumped off, cigar glowing in the dark, to sleep on the moth-eaten rugs in his gun-room, revolver beside him, lest the château should be robbed--though what indeed there remained to steal in the darkened rooms, save the heavy furniture, no one could have said--wine, food, bedding, small objects had gone one by one, for use, or as souvenirs. The silver had been buried by Mercadet in the garden. But the Baron slept in the empty château, by instinct.

He was not alone long.

There was an almost dramatic fitness about the Army’s choice of his one companion. A red-headed Welshman, answering to the name of Jacobs, was posted there, as District Sanitary Engineer. The glamor and intensity was gone from the war, and the situation was now one for Municipal Health Officers. The appointment was additionally fitting. For though adorned by the title of “doctor,” and adorning the rank of Captain, Jacobs was by profession a Borough Sanitary Engineer, one of those species peculiar to Great Britain. In its dying stages, those who ran the war were at last learning to put men to the job they could do best.

* * * * *

Such was the situation of what the French staff aptly called the “open town” of Hondebecq in the last weeks of the war. By daylight, the Spanish Farm was at work, Madeleine and her two veterans, with the two mules, getting in all the undamaged crops--for nearly a quarter of the total acreage of the farm was lost in trench and wire, dugout and shell-hole. Hardly a day passed but had its hair-breadth escape from buried “duds” or unexploded shell, or caved-in gun-pit. Madeleine worked because it was natural to her--because she had nothing else to do, possibly with some unconscious idea of dedication to her father’s memory. At dusk, Jacobs and the Baron would arrive, on bicycles, the one having toured his area, which stretched from the line of evacuation that ran from the Belgian border, through Hazebrouck down to Aire--away to the maze of desultory trenches from which the English troops were slowly pushing the last German machine gunners. The Baron usually acted as his guide, and in Jacobs’ company avoided otherwise certain arrest. Madeleine would just be finishing her evening meal with the veterans. Jacobs would produce a field message book in which he had noted the map reference of any unburied offence, human or otherwise, and at his order the old men would jog off with one of the tireless mules in a salvaged limber, two shovels, a tin of disinfectant, and a lantern clattering in the springless vehicle. Madeleine cleared the table and served dinner to Jacobs and the Baron, who would sit over it, drinking canteen whisky and discussing in English-French and French-English the submarine menace and surface drainage, by means of any daily papers they had gleaned during the day’s wandering, and with the help of Madeleine’s translation. By the time both were ready to return to their never-made “beds” in the château, the veterans would come clattering back, the mules going at an unearthly amble in the darkness, and all was ready for the morrow.

* * * * *